In a word: Yes.

There are three different ways that you can sell digital products using the Shop Kit Plus.

1. The first way is to setup the digital product just like you would your physical products. Then when you receive an order, email the digital files to the buyer.
2. The second method is to use the Products For Download section of Mals. Premium account holders can upload a maximum of 350 digital product listings. The products themselves are stored on your server.
3. The third option is to purchase Linklok for Mals. This system provides secure digital downloads to your customers.

I don’t recommend any of these methods.

1. The first methods is a pain in the rump if you get more than the occasional sale. And if you’re only getting the occasional sale, is it really worth it?
2. The second method is not secure, because you are sending direct links to your products.
3. The Linklok method is secure — but is a pain in the rump for me (or you!) to setup and update.

So what do I recommend?

I discovered WAHMcart a few months ago and have been using it myself for my information products (Presenting Your Products and Mals Advanced Shipping) . It is perfectly suited for the secure sales and internet marketing of digital products, such as ebooks or patterns.

You can use WAHMcart on more than one site. You can also use it in conjunction with your existing Shop Kit Plus installation, enabling you to sell physical and digital products on one site.

For example, you would add your digital products to the Shop Kit Plus, just like you would a physical product, except you would leave the price set to zero.

Then you would change the order button settings in Catalog Setup to only show when a price is set.

Finally, in the product description for your digital products, you’d include the order button code generated by WAHMcart. You and your customers would have the best of both worlds.

WAHMcart also comes with a built-in email marketing system that includes sequential autoresponders. You can even have a newsletter for each product. Or a newsletter for people who are interested in a specific product — and when they order, the system can move them over to the customer list for that product.

The downside? WAHMcart is $30 per month.

In my opinion, as a happy WAHMcart and SKP, user: It’s well worth it.

But don’t just listen to my opinion: Try out the 14-day trial for $1 yourself…

UPDATE: If you are just starting out, you may wonder why you’d need the SKP and WAHMcart. The reason I recommend these two is because the SKP includes a WYSIWYG HTML editor that makes it a breeze to manage your pages. You can even use the category and product system as a online catalog. Just turn off the cart features in the SKP and include the WAHMCart order buttons in the product description.

Now, if you want to use HTML pages or a Wordpress blog to power your site, with a WAHMcart backend, you can do that, too. You’ll just need a plain jane hosting account, like the ones we offer at Watersweb Hosting.

You’ve just finished eating dinner, your husband wants to talk to you about his day at work, the kids are demanding your attention, and you’ve got to make a decision: Should you purchase the Shop Kit Plus, or go with a free shopping cart like OScommerce, Zen Cart or Agora Cart.

At first blush, it seems like a no-brainer.

OScommerce, Zen Cart and Agora Cart are free. You don’t have to shell out any money to acquire them and you can do the installation yourself. Or ask the nearest 15-year-old.

These carts also sport some features that Shop Kit Plus doesn’t, including a built-in shopping cart system (SKP is actually an online catalog script that uses Mals Ecommerce as a backend cart), multiple languages, email or newsletter systems, customer login, product reviews and lists of what other customers ordered.

It’s not until after you’ve setup your site and are deep into the process of building your busineses’ online home that you come face-to-face with the drawbacks of these systems.

Drawbacks of the free/open-source shopping carts

1. If something weird starts happening, or you have trouble figuring out what you are doing, your only recourse is research documentation that is written by and for developers and is hard to understand by normal people or wait for one or more of the volunteers on the support forums associated with the product to have time to answer your questions.

This is assume that you’ve figured out on your own that whatever problem you are having is with the software, not your hosting account. And if it’s with your hosting account, you’ll be lucky to have a host who is familiar enough with the software to know that it’s not the software causing the problem. Otherwise, you’ll be stuck between a rock and a hard place in your quest for answers.

With the Shop Kit Plus, you have reliable support. We have more than 30 technicians who are paid to help you troubleshoot your hosting and Shop Kit Plus problems. We have also spent hundreds of hours putting together printable manuals, forums, a knowledgebase and now the Watersweb Shops Articles to help you setup and maintain your online shop. I also have a financial stake in keeping you happy. The Shop Kit Plus developer has a stake in keeping you happy.

2. Free is not all it’s cracked up to be. With the “free” carts, you will also need an SSL certificate to provide a secure connection for your clients to check out. With the SKP and Mals, that secure connection is already provided. Not to mention, the people in charge of making sure that connection is secure, and that any data stored in a database is complete secure and encrypted are experts in that specific technology. A general web hosting company technician who services thousands of general sites is not going to be an ecommerce security expert.

3. Shop Kit Plus was developed with ease of use in mind. While it does have many of the backend features such as multiple shipping, taxation and payment options, our goal was to keep it easy to use, easy to customize and easy to work with.

You will not have to edit 10 different templates to change the way your navigation bar appears. You will not have to heavily modify the cart in order to fit your existing design into it. Simply create your design (or use a free template, a WAHM-built template or a custom web design), plug our site codes, and your site is built. Adding your products, categories, options and pages is as simple as filling out web forms.

The aforementioned carts are heavy on complex features — and hard to use, in my experience and in the experience of my clients who have tried them and left. The learning curve tends to be steeper on these products than on the Shop Kit Plus.

4. After five years experience and trying everything I can find to fit my needs and the needs of my WAHM physical product sellers, I have decided that it is best to recommend that you rely on experts for the ecommerce features that your business is built on. I’m not against open source software (as a matter of fact, I embrace software packages such as Wordpress). However, I recognize that there are some open source products that, in my opinion, are too much of a hassle to make it them worth the few dollars you will save.

5. With this in mind, I’d like to recommend some of the services that I use to promote my business, and that you can use to promote yours:

• Email Marketing: Aweber
• Merchant Account: E-Onlinedata
• Blogging: Wordpress (Can be installed via your Watersweb cPanel)

My Recommendation

Overall, in my opinion, if you are good with code and you enjoy playing with, modifying and working on your site, then zen, Agora or OScommerce might be right up your alley. Or they might be right for you if you can hire someone to customize the cart and maintain it for you.

My point is that these carts have their place.

But if you are wanting a simple ecommerce and hosting solution that will get the job done, with reliable support, easy to use features, multiple shipping and payment options, and a highly customizable front end, I recommend you consider Shop Kit Plus.

Much conflicting information about search engine optimization abounds on the internet. I can go to just about any WAHM message board and find incorrect information, including:

• Adding meta tags will increase your search engine rankings
• You must submit your site to Google
• Submit your site to top sites to increase your traffic
• Making sure you have the right keyword density will increase your search engine rankings

Adding alt and title tags also will not improve your traffic or search engine rankings (however, these elements will help with usability of your website for people with disabilities).

None of the strategies mentioned above will improve your search engine rankings. Search engines (of which there are only four, btw: Google, MSN, Yahoo and Ask) do not use meta tags to rank your site. Google predominantely relies on Link Popularity and the content of your website. The other search engines also rely on similar criteria.

You also do not need to submit your site to a search engine. All you need to do is get another site, that is already indexed in the search engine, to link to you. Because search engines use “bots” to crawl the internet, you don’t need to do anything else. They will find you.

Top sites are also not a good idea — unless you’re running it. They are great at driving traffic to the top site owner’s website, not so much to yours.

Making sure your keyword density is also a misguided effort at gaming the search engines. Just don’t. Write naturally. Which brings us to what you SHOULD do when optimizing your site.

Proper Website Optimization Techniques

1. It is worth mentioning again: Write naturally, for your customers. Your customers are the people who are going to buy your products, not the search engines. You can get tons of traffic, but if no one buys, all you’re going to get is a higher hosting bill.
2. Do proper keyword research, so you know what keyword phrases your customers use to find your site. And don’t just stick with one-word phrases, like candles. Look for “long-tail” phrases, such as “cotton blossom scented candle.”
3. Use one appropriate keyword phrase for each product on your site, for each category and for each page. Include the keyword phrase in the page title, the product title (and meta title, which is the title at the top of your browser window — not the same as a meta tag) and the headline on your page or category.
4. Write product descriptions that include your keyword phrase and all the information your customer needs. (Learn more about writing product descriptions.)
5. Encourage people who link to your site to use the appropriate keyword phrase in the anchor text of their link (the text between the linking tags).
6. Write such great content that other people are compelled to link to your stuff in the content of their websites. Including your link in a directory or on a page of links isn’t good enough. Get linked in the main content of the site, such as on a message board, in a blog post or in a site article.
7. Setup a weblog on your site and give people several options to subscribe to the RSS feed, set it up in technorati and other blog directories, and write often about your products and your industry. Make sure it is interesting to your customers. Tell them about yourself as well.
8. Write articles to submit to article directories and other websites, who will publish your content with your author bio, which includes a link back to your site.
9. Write newsworthy press releases and submit them to online press release sites and to your local media.
10. Did I mention write great content that your customers will read?!

For more SEO and Internet Marketing information, check out Michelle Waters Online and Product Seller’s Talk Radio.

Sometimes you reach a point where continuing with your current business is undesireable. Or maybe you are the type of person who loves the challenge of starting a new business — but hate the day-to-day work of keeping it going.

In either case, you may wish to sell your site. Once you have a buyer who is interested, you’ve signed agreements and money has changed hands, you’ll need to turn the keys to your website over to the new owner.

As the current owner of the website, you will need to submit a support ticket to the Watersweb Helpdesk Sales and Billing Department,  to let us know that you are transferring the site to someone else.

You will need to include the following information in your ticket about the NEW owner:

• Full Name
• Address
• City, State, Zip code
• Email Address
• Phone number

Once we have recieved this information, we will create a new Billing account for the new owner, transfer the website and (if applicable) domain packages to the new account. If you have no other sites or services with us, we will delete your credit card information from our encrypted database and deactivate your account.

Of course, you are always welcome to come back if you need a new website. Just submit a helpdesk ticket and ask us to reactivate your account.

If you have other sites or services with us, then your account will remain active, minus the site packages you just sold.

Congrats!

As a fellow work at home mom, I understand how hard it is to balance family with work.

(Right now, I’m sitting here typing while my husband cooks dinner. I think I’ve been at the computer since around 9 a.m. LOL)

I also understand that sometimes our plans don’t turn out the way we want. Or our situations change and prevent us from following the path we had originally chosen.

When life gets in the way of your plans to start a home business, you may need to cancel your hosting account or domain registration. We have taken steps to make this as easy and painless as possible.

To cancel your services, please go to Watersweb Helpdesk and submit a support ticket to the Cancellation Department. Make sure you fill out all the information we request, including making sure you send the email from the email address we have on file in the billing center.

If you chose to cancel your account within the first 30 days after you order your hosting account, we will refund your hosting and Shop Kit Plus license fees.

We do not offer refunds after the initial 30-day period. We also do not offer refunds on domain registrations or services provided.

Have you ever received payment for a product, shipped the item, and then had the Paypal payment reversed?

One of my clients just had this happen to her recently.

Apparently, she was in communication with the customer when she shipped the item. A couple of days later, the customer filed a dispute with Paypal, who reversed the charge.

How do you prevent this from happening to you?

First, my client, in this case, shipped her products via First Class mail. I strongly recommend you ship with delivery confirmation. You can add this option when printing your shipping label from Paypal.

Second, make sure you are in full communication with the customer. It sounds like my client did follow this advice, so in her case, she should save all communications with the client.

And third, I recommend that you contact the post office in the event that your customer claims a package didn’t arrive. Contact the post office in the customers area and ask them to research the shipment for you.

And fourth, make sure you are familiar with Paypal’s policies:

• Understanding Chargebacks 
• Seller Protection Policies 

Every few months, I get a letter in the mail from this company, telling me that I need to renew my domain names with them or risk losing my online identity.

Now, I’ve been ignoring these, because I know full well that I did not register any domain names with this company. All of my domain names are registered through my own services.

However, I just received a phone call today from a client who also received a letter. Fortunately, he knew that he had registered his domain name with me, and just wanted to verify that if he paid his domain registration invoice that I sent him via email, his domain would be safe. I assured him that it would be and that he could just toss the letter.

What bothers me about this whole scenario though is that I have clients out there who have registered their domain names through me, through GoDaddy, or whoever — and who may not realize that the letter they recieve from Libery Names Of America is not an invoice.

Liberty goes out of their way to make the letter look like an invoice (even though they do have one boldfaced sentence saying the letter is not a bill).

They claim that you can avoid facing complication in the future by renewing and transfering your domain name to them.

My thoughts: Aren’t they creating complications by sending out these invoices to people who already have their domain names registered elsewhere?!

Libery claims that if you renew with them today, you’ll save a lot of money. Well, I charge $15 for domain registrations and renewals. GoDaddy charges about $10. Liberty charges $25. Hmmm….

The company also states that their domain names include free DNS, URL and email forwarding. I laughed when I read this.

First of all, DNS services are provided by your ISP and web host, not through the registrar. The URL is the same thing as your domain name. And if you have a web hosting account, you should have email forwarding built into that service.

So, the things they are “giving” you for free either aren’t theirs to give, or are free with everyone else, too.

I tried to read the small print on the back — but the print is in a light grey, is very tiny, and my children have hidden my magnifying glass.

Failing this attempt, I decided to read around on the internet to see what other people say about Liberty Names of America:

• Many Say Liberty Names Of America Are Scammers
• Discussion on WebHostingTalk.com
• Domain Fraud Alert: Slamming

My recommendation: If you receive a letter from this company, we recommend you report it to the following organizations:

• United States Postal Inspection Service
• ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers)
• Internet Fraud Complaint Center

We also recommend you go right now to Domain Tools and enter your domain name to check your WHOIS record. This will show you who is your current registrar. You should only send money to the company that you actually registered your domain name with.

If you are registered with Watersweb, your WHOIS will look like this:

ICANN Registrar: ENOM, INC.

Further down, you will see this:

Registration Service Provided By: Watersweb Solutions, LLC
Contact:
Visit: http://www.waterswebhosting.net

This means that you have registered your domain name through Watersweb. I provide my registration services through Enom, which allows me to provide the services, while allowing you to register the domain in your own name.

If you have any questions, please let me know!

The very basics of administering your Shop Kit Plus are setting up Categories and Pages.

Categories
A category is somewhat like a file where you will store similar products. In order to properly setup your catalog, you will first need to setup categories. For example, if you are selling cloth diapers, your categories might be Prefolds, All-In-Ones, Diaper Covers, Accessories. Inside each category, you will have several products.

To setup your Categories, go to the Catalog admin, Click categories in the left column then Add in the middle column. If you aren’t sure what to put in a specific area, click the question mark in the top right corner of the page.

Tip: To include a graphical button for your category in the navigation area, upload your graphic in the Nav Image area. Do this by clicking the Upload button next to it and following the instructions.

Pages
Pages are like the ancilliary on another Shopping Cart system. This is where you can have HTML pages that contain information such as shipping and privacy policies, information about your business, sizing charts, etc.

You setup your site’s page just like you setup the categories, including the way you add your navigation images. Place your page content in the Content section, using HTML to format it. DO NOT include any <html>,<head> or <body> tags, as those tags are already included on the page in your template. Everything included in the content section will go in the area that is set aside in your template for content.

Links to your pages will display in the navigation column with your categories. You can turn this feature off when you setup the page. You can also decide where in the navigation column to show the pages with specific template codes and choosing a group number when you setup the page. (Read the help documents, accessible by the question mark on the template page and the information when you click the site codes link to determine how to do this.)

Tip: If you do not include navigation images for your Categories or Pages, the text you put in the top textarea is what will show as the link in the navigation column.

The Authorization Code, also referred to as an EPP key, is a unique number that is assigned to each domain name when it is registered and adds a layer of security to the domain name.

You must obtain the EPP key from your domain’s current registrar before submitting the domain for transfer.

Currently, the top level domains requiring an EPP key for transfer are: .com, .net, .org, .info, .cn, .biz, .com.cn, .net.cn, .org.cn, .cn, .in and .us. (This is not intended to be a complete list.)

How do I get my domain’s EPP Key?

You may be able to obtain the key from within the online domain management system at some registrars. Others may require you to contact them by email or phone to request the EPP key.

Here are some specific registrar examples. (If you do not see your registrar here, please contact them directly.)

Go Daddy

1. Log into your GoDaddy.com account
2. Click the “Manage Domains” link
3. Click on the domain name you wish to transfer
4. Click the “Auth Info Code: (send by email)” link

The authorization code will be sent to the administrative contact for the domain, via email.

Watersweb Domain Registration

If you registered your domain with Watersweb, you can retrieve your EPP key via the domain management section of the Billing Center, or by submitting a support ticket to the Watersweb Helpdesk.

I will send you an invoice for your monthly hosting fees two days before the first of every month. If you are paying by automatic credit card payment, you don’t need to do anything at this point. If you are paying via Paypal or manual credit card payment, you should log into the Billing Center and pay your invoice at this time.

Once you have paid your invoice or I have run it through the payment processor, you will receive a payment receipt, which will show, in red or green letters, the status of your payment.

Please check this receipt to make sure your payment went through properly. I also recommend that you print it out for tax purposes.

Here are the possible status messages:

• Manual Payment — This means that your Paypal or manual credit card payment was processed.
• Approved — This means that your automatic credit card payment was processed.
• Declined – This means your automatic credit card payment was NOT processed. You MUST contact me to make arrangements for payment, or risk having your account suspended.

Please make sure you contact and/or credit card information is up-to-date. Accounts with overdue invoices will receive notification via email on the 5th and 10th day of the month. Our Billing Manager will call you after the 10th, as an extra step to let you know that you have an outstanding invoice. You will receive a site suspension notice on the 15th. Your site will be suspended shortly thereafter.

Planning your finances and making sure you pay invoices on their due date — always the first day of the month — will prevent your site from being suspended.